Following leaks earlier in the week, Crusader Kings 3 and Hearts of Iron IV creators Paradox Interactive have officially announced Afterworld, a post-apocalyptic grand strategy game about wasteland tribes jostling for dominance of a procedurally generated North America. It’s Paradox Development Studio’s “first non-historical setting in a decade”, in the words of game director Dan Lind.

When I first heard about the leak, my imagination naturally flew to the Fallout series, but while there are certainly parallels, Afterworld ain’t no twinkly retrofuturist extravaganza with Louis Armstrong on the radio. The feel seems closer to 11 bit’s city-builder Frostpunk and Proxy’s sci-fi 4X Zephon, give or take a spoonful of Mad Max references. Think culture-defining choices such as deciding whether your tribe’s kids should learn to read. Or logistical quagmires such as sending out biker gangs to form a supply line with a beached oil tanker. Or making vassals out of neighbour tribes, like The Rustguzzlers of Golgotha. (I invented that one. You can’t have them.)

“This is the first world we’ve gotten to build from scratch in a long time,” Lind continues in the announcement release, “and the first one we’ve had the pleasure of destroying before the game starts. The old world is still out there in fragments, waiting to be found.” Cue ominous roll of thunder. And trailer.

We’ll have a proper preview for you once Julian has finished pillaging Gamescom. In the meantime, here’s a little breakdown of the new strategy game from me, based on 10 minutes of B-roll that, I have to say, looks nothing like that announcement trailer. In Afterworld, you get a choice of origins, prologues, and formative “Traumas” that decide your initial resource make-up and priorities. For example, you can play as a group of Shelterfolk – Vault Dwellers, basically – who turned cannibal during a lean season and are somewhat prone to demagogery.

You pick a place to settle and start scrounging for food, water and fuel, but this isn’t quite akin to your first city in Civ; from the looks of things, you’ll relocate often in response to threats and resource pressures. The extremely large world map is divided into regions covered in fog of war, which can become territories. As you roam, encounters with other tribes and certain buildings or terrain features will give you Ideas that unlock technologies for research. Crossing a river might cause one of your leathery marauders to brainfart the concept of irrigation, for example.

There are also pre-Fall techs you can discover that give you a serious edge. I assume that nukes are still in play – the press release notes that “the same power that ended the old world could end the new one too”. Mind you, I’m not 100% clear as yet on how this world ended. It doesn’t look quite as cratered as Fallout’s America.

As you forage and expand, you’ll also cultivate your tribe’s social customs, beliefs, political systems and laws. You might introduce townhall democracy, ban drinking, organise the wayward youth into work crews, and outlaw slavery – all the while processing chaotic influences from the socities beyond your territories. There are named characters within your tribe with distinct stats, who can captain war parties and serve in office.

The bit that interests me most here is religion. You can define some philosophies (e.g. “nuclear ecclesia”) as orthodox and others as false, tricksy, wicked. But your folk have some agency about what they believe, separating into groups of agreers and doubters, and other tribes may have clashing values and mythologies that interfere with diplomacy and trade. How are you supposed to barter batteries for condensed milk when the Condensed Milk Gang believe that all of you are secretly Atlanteans who are trying to build a staircase to the Moon? (I invented that one too, although now I think about it, I can’t say for sure that Atlantis doesn’t exist in Afterworld.)

Speaking of rival tribes, the boxfront goal is to unite them all under your raggedy banner and found a new American empire, multiplying your resource and supply problems exponentially. But I’m hoping there will be the option of playing through the whole game as a lesser warband, content to pay tribute to an NPC overlord. We Rustguzzlers have no truck with that Alexander the Grating, manifest destiny bollocks. There is so much rust to guzzle, and so little time.

Afterworld, then. It’s got a lot going on! You can see the heavy fingerprints of Paradox’s previous historical strategy games, seared into the bullet-raddled chrome of everything they’ve borrowed from the likes of Mad Max. But it does feel like a brand new start, if that’s the right phrase for crawling out of a bunker with acute radiation poisoning. There’s co-op and PvP too, but no release date yet beyond “coming soon”. Also coming soon: a proper preview and a chat with Paradox.